Hi folks,
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Back here after a few days away and thought I'd chime in.
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Monday marks the 17th anniversary of my first Y-DNA order at Family Tree DNA. I'm still one of the younger ones here, but that still makes me feel old! There have been a lot of changes in genetic genealogy over that time, and they generally fall into two camps: benefits that we get from better testing, and problems that we get from increased legislation and evolution in ethical/political norms.
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Our main issue here is that one feeds the other. Increased testing allows us to more precisely pinpoint individuals using their genomes, and this has been exploited by everyone from adoption searches to law-enforcement agencies. We are also learning more about the genome and its function, which raises concerns that our genomes could be used for both legitimate issues such as health concerns, but also opens up issues related to medical insurance. Once we start to get into issues where people's freedoms, insurance and money are at risk, then people start to look for concerns about how these systems and their (mis)management affect them. My stance here has always been that, when you take a genetic test, you should treat your genome as public - perhaps now, perhaps at some nebulous point in the distant future when we're long dead - and you should be comfortable with that eventuality.
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Then there are the unknown unknowns. The world is still working out how we treat genetic data in an ethical and regulatory sense. The data breach at 23andMe didn't end the world, but it significantly contributed to the end of the company, yet the ramifications for people whose data was stolen have (as far as I know) been little worse than a data breach at any other company. Will this still be the case if long-read WGS tests become the norm and we gain a much better understanding of the whole genome? What safeguards do we need to put in place now so that our data cannot be used in ways we don't want it to be? There has been a massive shift in how admins have had to ethically treat individuals and their data over the last 10 years, with the EU's GDPR bill being a major catalyst. A lot of this was begun out of fear of litigation, but with hindsight a lot of it has also been the right thing to do.
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Then there is the ability of technology to keep up with an adapt to the new tests. When our group were comparing Y-67 matches among a few hundred testers, that was easy to do on a spreadsheet. When we were comparing BigY-500 results among one or two thousand testers, that was possible to do by someone like me with a bit of computing knowledge and a laptop. When the number of testers reached into the multiple thousands, a laptop couldn't cope with the analysis, and we had to rely on sites like the Y-DNA Warehouse for our community analysis. Now James is saying that that model is no longer viable, and we have to rely on high-performance computing at FTDNA HQ until the community can come up with the next generation of computing needed to analyse the data as we need.
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The success or otherwise of our ability to keep using DNA to explore deep ancestry therefore depends on several factors, including:
- The ability of testing companies to improve services, attract customers and make a profit.
- The resilience of databases against bad actors and malpractice, and the public perception of the associated risks.
- The balance of availability of useful data to citizen scientists like ourselves, versus the legislative, litigation-driven and public fear of data misuse.
- The ability of technology to keep up with the increased data volumes of a larger number of bigger tests, in terms of storage, processing and cost.
In 2025, we have so far seen more losses in our abilities to conduct genetic genealogy than we have seen gains, but I think "mass extinction" might be too strong a phrase. I think we are far from the death knell of deep genetic ancestry testing, and what we are seeing at the moment is an evolution on a pathway towards a more steady state of testing as the technologies involved continue to mature. Looking forward, we have major opportunities with long-read testing in a few years' time, and I am hopeful that we will see dramatic improvements in what we can do with genetic genealogy as a result when this comes.
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Best wishes,
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Iain.
